a A grave-faced President of the United States addresses the nation from the Oval Office. Despite all he has accomplished, he relinquishes power and passes the baton to the Vice President, apparently bowing to pressure from his own party and stepping down against his will.
This was Joe Biden in 2024. So was Richard Nixon, under very different circumstances, 50 years ago Thursday. Disgraced by the Watergate break-in and cover-up, Nixon will likely leave an unwanted mark in history as the first, and still only, man to ever resign from the U.S. presidency.
For Elizabeth Holtzman, then the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, it was a day of hope: the establishment of America’s system of checks and balances to hold Nixon accountable for his role in the Watergate scandal. But her optimism was short-lived: A month later, Nixon received a full pardon from his successor, President Gerald Ford.
“The pardon was inexcusable,” Holtzman, who turns 83 this week, said by phone from his home in Brooklyn, New York. “It created a double justice: one for those in power in this country and one for everyone else.”
Half a century later, she still suspects Ford’s motives were not as noble as often made out, and worries that it set a dangerous precedent for someone like Donald Trump.But looking back on her long career as a trailblazer, Holtzman is optimistic that America will elect its first female president in November.
In 1972, at age 31, she graduated from Harvard Law School and defeated a 50-year incumbent, Emanuel Celler, to win a House seat in Brooklyn, New York. Prefiguring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Holtzman took to the streets and out-campaigned against her more well-known opponent, appealing to voters in lines at every subway station in her district and outside movie theaters showing “The Godfather.”
In the summer of 1972, five men were arrested in a botched operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington, a nasty ploy aimed at destroying Nixon’s challenger in that year’s presidential election.
Nixon and his aides attempted to cover up their involvement in the White House break-in and obstructed law enforcement investigations. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein played key roles in uncovering the incident, with the help of a confidential informant known as “Deep Throat” (later identified as FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt).
The FBI, the Senate Watergate Committee, and special prosecutor Archibald Cox also investigated the scandal. It was revealed that President Nixon had a secret recording system in the Oval Office that recorded conversations. In 1974, after a lengthy legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Nixon to release the tapes, which contained evidence that he had been involved in a cover-up from the beginning.
Holtzman was one of the members of the House Judiciary Committee that recommended articles of impeachment against the president. She recalled, “The evidence was overwhelming. I remember at one point feeling like I was in bottomless quicksand. I kept hearing story after story of crime, wrongdoing, and abuse of power, and I just kept sinking deeper and deeper into the mire.”
The gravity of the moment is immense. This will be only the second presidential impeachment in American history, following that of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. “No one on the Democratic or Republican side had ever voted to impeach President Richard Nixon,” recalls Holtzman, who published “The Case for Impeaching Trump” five years ago.
“Chairman Peter Rodino, a very liberal Democrat, famously went back to his office and cried after the first vote on impeachment. Nobody wanted to see that, and I found it very uncomfortable. It was a very difficult thing to vote for.”
“I never questioned Nixon’s guilt or whether he should have been impeached. It’s clear that the Framers of the Constitution wrote the articles of impeachment largely with Nixon in mind. But that’s not the issue. What matters is that he was my president, and I never wanted to see any President of the United States engage in this kind of misconduct, this degree and level of abuse of power and criminality.”
She added: “I didn’t want to watch it, I felt awful watching it, and it was a very sobering moment. Nobody was happy. It wasn’t a Democrat moment of, ‘We’re done!’ That’s the difference between then and now. People took impeachment seriously.”
Initially, many Republicans remained loyal to President Nixon and denied that he was personally involved, despite mounting evidence, but the “smoking gun” supported White House Counsel John Dean’s assertion that Nixon had instructed aides to order the CIA to drop the FBI’s investigation of the robbery.
Holtzman added: “That was a key part of the cover-up. Republicans could no longer claim that there was no evidence that Nixon didn’t know what was going on. He had been directing the cover-up almost from day one.”
“At that point, all of what I call ‘resistance Republicans’ said they would support impeachment if it was taken up by the House. Eventually, the Republicans themselves acted on the facts, but up until that point they would not accept anything other than the audiotapes.”
Three Republican leaders came to the White House to warn Nixon that he did not have enough Republican votes to avoid impeachment. The following night, as a crowd outside the White House gates chanted “Lock up the president,” Nixon announced his resignation in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office. The speech focused on his presidential accomplishments and made no admissions of guilt.
On the morning of August 9, a sweaty Nixon gave an impromptu speech to his White House staff, some of whom broke down in tears. “Always remember, people may hate you, but if you don’t hate them, the people who hate you don’t win. If you do, you destroy yourself,” Nixon said. Woodward called the speech “one of the most interesting and important moments in presidential history.”
But Holtzman was undeterred. “To me, this is not a Shakespearean tragedy. This is a man who grossly abused his power and fought his political opponents. He’s a man who told us to look after our enemies, who turned on his political opponents and tried to get the IRS to do harassing audits. He’s a man who wiretapped journalists he thought were leaking information.
“This is the man who went after Daniel Ellsberg (the defense analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers) and authorized a break-in at his psychiatrist’s office. He never admitted guilt. He never showed remorse. It’s all very well to preach to others that they shouldn’t do something, but what about practicing what you preach? We were blind to his shortcomings and never acknowledged them.”
Nixon gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn of the White House before being taken away by helicopter. As he took the oath of office as the 38th president, Ford said America’s “long national nightmare is over.” A few weeks later, he granted Nixon a full and unconditional pardon. Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward, “You won’t believe it! That bastard pardoned that bastard!”
Holtzman was furious. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, she directly questioned Ford about the pardon. The president argued that a criminal indictment, trial, and conviction would distract the White House, Congress, and the American people from urgent problems that needed to be solved at home and abroad.
Fifty years later, Holzman remains convinced Ford was wrong: “I took action before the House Judiciary Committee to hold the president accountable and to provide a case for accountability in a bipartisan way that the public could understand.
“The president who said, ‘I’ll do anything right now,’ actually did so within a month of leaving office. Where was the transparency? What is the rationale for this? Why would he do this? Let the system work.”
The criminal justice system, she continues, should not have been tampered with: “The special prosecutor should have been allowed to review all the evidence to determine whether criminal charges were warranted, allow a grand jury to make an indictment, and, if necessary, go to trial to see whether a conviction would result.”
“Short-circuiting this process was a gross political stunt, an abuse of power, and raised questions that remain unresolved to this day about whether the pardon was part of a deal to get Nixon out of office to help Republicans in the midterm elections. Do you know that was Ford’s motivation? It could have been. Clearly, that was an underlying motivation for him.”
President Trump, who faces federal criminal charges for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, has floated the idea of pardoning himself and his supporters who attacked police and stormed the U.S. Capitol. “This blatant political use of the pardon power is wrong,” Holtzman said.
“This is an abuse of power and should never happen. A thorough review is needed to reform how the pardon power is used, because Donald Trump’s comments that he would pardon those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th are beyond reprehensible.”
She also rejects the idea that a Democratic president should consider pardoning Trump: “Pardons do not create national unity. There was no serious division among the American people over the impeachment of President Nixon. The overwhelming majority of the American people supported impeachment.”
“The idea that we have to unite the country because Nixon was removed from office is nonsense. The American people came together because we recognized that upholding the Constitution and the rule of law is more important than any president, Republican or Democrat. We came together on those principles, not on the principles of any particular person.”
Ford lost the 1976 election to Democrat Jimmy Carter. “Ford was thrown out of office. He didn’t get re-elected because of the pardon, so how was that going to unite anyone? It seems to me like the pardon was used as a blatant political tool to get Nixon out of office.”
Holtzmann spent eight years in the House of Representatives, leading an effort to try Nazi war criminals in the US, and later served as Brooklyn district attorney, but she also had setbacks, coming close to being elected New York’s first female senator by just 1 percentage point in 1980, losing a Senate primary in 1992, and serving one term as New York City’s comptroller before being defeated in a banking scandal.
Ms. Holtzman’s record as the youngest woman elected to Congress was broken in 2014 by Republican Elise Stefanik, who was 30 at the time. Two years ago, Ms. Holtzman ran unsuccessfully for a comeback to the House of Representatives in a newly created district covering parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
But Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race this year in favor of Kamala Harris has raised the prospect that we may see a woman in the Oval Office in her lifetime. “We’re seeing more and more women in key positions in this country, and slowly but surely, the American people are starting to realize that just as men can do a great job, there are women who can do a terrible job,” she muses.
“To exclude a woman from the presidency because she is a woman is wrong, it is prejudiced and it takes away great talent. I am very optimistic about Vice President Harris’ campaign and her chances of success and I think it’s a great thing for our country. It’s another way we can be a beacon in the world.”
